Bitcoin “less useful for payments” says fintech firm as it phases out the cryptocurrency

Irish internet payment tech firm, Stripe, announced it was ending bitcoin support. In 2014, it was one of the first major payments company to support bitcoin payments.

Over the past year or two, as block size limits have been reached, bitcoin has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange, wrote Tom Karlo, Product Manager for Payment Methods and Dashboard at Stripe, in a blog post.

Some of the key points for winding down support were that transaction confirmation times have risen substantially; this, in turn, has led to an increase in the failure rate of transactions denominated in fiat currencies. (By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in bitcoin price mean that it’s for the “wrong” amount.) Furthermore, fees have risen a great deal. For a regular bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of US dollars is common, making bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.

“Because of this, we’ve seen the desire from our customers to accept bitcoin decrease. And of the businesses that are accepting bitcoin on Stripe, we’ve seen their revenues from bitcoin decline substantially. Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with bitcoin makes sense,” wrote Karlo.

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